Roboform Support of Flock
I have mentioned my intrigue with the Flock browser before, and how a big barrier for me to use Flock was the fact that you could not use Roboform, a very nice password management utility that I use, with Flock. I actually opened a support ticket with Roboform regarding their support for Flock, and just heard back from them today with some interesting news.
Roboform plans to add support for Flock in their next Roboform adapter release, which they mentioned as being “less than a week” away. I am very excited, and others should be as well, because I know many people use Roboform to manage their passwords and help protect their privacy on-line. Without the ability to easily port your password management between browsers, you are definitely hindered in what you can do with a browser.
With Flock being at such an early stage of development, why would Roboform want to spend their resources to support it, when so much is potentially subject to change with the app? I think there are 3 very good reasons, and whether these were actually their motivations or not, I can’t say, but I think the implications suggested by them will be true regardless:
- Flock is based on stable, released Mozilla code, which Roboform already supports. One would think that updating the current Mozilla or Firefox adapter should not involve significant development.
- There is a lot of interest and intrigue around Flock – the app itself (“the social web browser” that will “take back web 2.0”, the development methodology (open source, distributed development, very public discourse on the product direction), and the people involved (Chris Messina, Bart DeCrem to name a few). By not supporting Flock, Roboform could alienate some current customers that are interested in spending some time using this new browser.
- By supporting Flock now, being one of the earliest apps / extensions / plugins that can work officially with Flock and not just via a hack of the Firefox extension, Roboform could gain a following and new customers among the early adopters and influential tech people who are currently reading about, writing about and trying out Flock.
I will eagerly await Roboform’s next adapter release, and will write about how it works with Flock.
To find out more about Roboform, and to download it and use it for free, or to upgrade to the PRO version that allows you to manage an unlimited number of passwords, checkout their website.
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